First came the 'guerrilla store'. In warehouses or disused buildings in the hippest parts of London or New York, fashion designers would set up shops that lasted only a couple of days, allowing them to off-load stock or try out new creations to an audience restricted to those hip enough to hear about the openings by word of mouth.

And now we have the guerrilla restaurant; usually housed in makeshift structures and situated off every beaten track, with top chefs but a deliberately limited lifespan. For those drawn to restaurants with three-month waiting lists and secret phone numbers for the privileged few, this is the next step - a restaurant so exclusive that there's no advertising, it's very hard to find, and that if you're not in the loop it will have vanished by the time you even discover it.

Earlier this year, the Antwerp restaurateur Vinko Pepa opened a temporary dining space called Mist, crafted with postmodernist flair from rough, cheap materials and designed to vanish after five months. 'A temporary restaurant allows for more risk taking,' says Pepa. 'I had some talented chefs, Njegosh Kalicanin and Tim Teck, whom I wanted to give free reign to in the kitchen. It also allowed us to experiment with the interior. You can surprise people.'

There have been supperclubs across the world for some years, with club promoters taking over existing restaurants for one night only - Modern Times, for example, the London based retro jazz club, hosted a dinner at the old Titanic space this summer and at the Chelsea's Bluebird Dining Rooms last year. The guerrilla concept merely takes the exclusivity to another level - it's the foodie equivalent of the Eighties rave, where finding that elusive field somewhere off the M25 was all part of the experience.

Some say the origins of the blink-and-you'll-miss-it kitchen stem back to the paladares of Cuba, restaurants set up in private living rooms that can, by law, seat a maximum of 12 guests. Paladares come and go, but some have remained open year after year and become firm tourist fixtures, such as La Guarida in Havana.

Now, the phenomenon is spreading in the US. In San Francisco, on 'occasional Mondays', you can dine in the private home of one Jeremy Townsend , when he transforms his lounge into Ghetto Gourmet , though to sample the $30 set menu you'll have to be a friend of a friend. Elsewhere in California, two chefs who operate under the name of The Blind Pig regularly set up shop with one-night unlicensed underground restaurants. Details of locale are, again, passed by word of mouth.

A more overground operation is promised by Thomas Keller; his Californian restaurant Ad Hoc serves back-to-basics fried chicken and beef stroganoff and will be open for only a few months before being turned into a burger joint. Both endeavours are a radical move for the man behind Per Se in New York and French Laundry in Napa, two restaurants which regularly vie for 'best culinary experience in the world'.

For reasons known only to the Dutch, it's Amsterdam that seems to have cornered the market in guerrilla dining. In January the Palazzo provided cabaret along with a six-course tasting menu underneath a circus big top. Stranger still, Food Facility, organised by the arts collective MPD Export , was a restaurant that opened for one month with no kitchen - guests were invited to order fast food for delivery. The big story in the Netherlands this summer is Together, a waterside eaterie in what looks like a Purves & Purves greenhouse that, until and as yet undecided point in winter, it will be open until 1am every day serving up oysters, smoked salmon with wasabi mayo and Thai beef salad along with DJ accompaniment.

Guerrilla restaurants aren't just 'just for summer' either; soon they'll be 'just for Christmas'. London gets its own short-lived hotspot at the end of this year, courtesy of east London hipster restaurant Bistrotheque, the management of which will be opening a three-week 'pop up' restaurant in Brick Lane called the Reindeer that promises to be a fleeting but intensely high fashion hang out: fashion designer Giles Deacon is designing the crockery and stylist Katie Grand is creating the Christmas crackers. Don't expect turkey, though; this is still the Shoreditch triangle, after all - an upmarket bistro menu will be complemented with an oyster bar.

But when their flagship eaterie is a short walk away, why bother? Freedom to experiment, again, is the answer: 'You can't be as Christmassy as you might like with a normal restaurant because the people who come want regularity and see it as a kind of second home,' says Pablo Flack , one of Bistrotheque's founders. 'With this we can really go to town, but we're still treating this like a proper restaurant. All the work that went into creating Bistrotheque is going into it. The only difference is, it will end after three weeks.'